Individual Privacy: A Social Construction?

Introduction

In order to change the massive trend of disappearing privacy, many aspects of our daily lives must change. However, before we begin to discuss the actual implementations of privacy protections, we must deal with the ideals that have led to the current situation. Specifically, the ultimate ideal of individuality plays a central role. While it is true that we are all biologically unique, the consequences of a blind adherence to this belief of true individuality are dire from a privacy standpoint. We are social animals, and are defined by the people around us. The sooner this idea is accepted, the sooner we can more accurately assess the dangers to our privacy. This paper will discuss a few of the deductions arising from the individuality ideal, how they obfuscate the privacy concerns every individual should have, and why a social-creature view is required.

Because I am an individual I am unique

Individualism has played an enormous role in American history. From the American dream of the self-made man to the "Be All You Can Be" army slogan, the emphasis has always been on "you." While we are by definition unique, both biologically and environmentally (no two people have ever been exposed to the exact same experiences), this uniqueness is not as drastic as people assume. The privacy concern that enters here is an assumption that because we are all unique, no one can ever truly "know" us. Thus, we are willing to let the world into our life through sites such as Facebook, as that is only what "we" want others to see. The belief is that your uniqueness is still protected because not only is your Facebook profile not a full representation of you, but also that it would be impossible for anyone to know more than you want them to know. This reasoning is flawed for multiple reasons, but two very important interrelated misconceptions underlie the flaws: 1) information about others cannot elucidate my individual characteristics, and 2) individuals are not predictable. These misconceptions seem to arise from the following logic: because no person is exactly the same as me, then no information about others can possibly reveal anything about me; and because every person is uniquely different, no person is predictable.

Information about others does not reflect anything about me

At a basic level, many people assume that information they never disclose is therefore protected. This is clearly not true. To begin, not only must you not disclose the information, but everyone else who has the information also must not disclose it. This has come into the conscious minds of job applicants all over. Not only must you monitor what you post of yourself, but also what others post of you. Assuming that neither you nor anyone else has disclosed the information, does that make it secure? Once again, the answer is no. In order to protect the privacy of your information it is necessary that others protect that information about themselves. A useful example is the recent discussion of the dangers of President Obama having a Blackberry. Should an interested party wish to find out which Blackberry was the President's, and thereby have knowledge of his whereabouts, that party would only need to deduce it from accessible information about others. For instance, if everyone in the White House kept the same phones, it would be easy to deduce which phone belonged to the President over a matter of time based on traffic in and out of the White House. _See_ Obama phone article. Anonymity in such a situation is only possible if a large enough group within the White House and the President, changed their phones frequently. While this is an extreme example of what can be gleaned from knowing information about others, the point is very important. Indirectly gained knowledge is just as informative as that gained directly, and knowledge about each one of us is indirectly provided by others if they are not as concerned with privacy as we are.

Because I am unique I am unpredictable

This unpredictability belief seems to stem from the idea that no person ever always knows either what he is going to do, or why he is going to do it. If this is the case, could someone else possibly know this? The answer is yes, and we fail to see that because we do not recognize the unconscious patterns which we all follow. Take buying a new piece of technology as an example. How much research do you normally put into this? How long from the time you start looking into the technology does it take you to buy? These factors and many more are easily recordable based on your website visitation patterns and Google searches. Could someone influence your decision on what piece of technology to buy (or where you buy it from) by having access to this information? If you are typically an impulse buyer and Google returns an advertisement for a "One-day Sale," might you buy that item even if the "One-day Sale" price is actually more expensive than it would normally be? This does not seem a very dangerous occurrence at first, after all you are only spending some extra money, but what does this say about your autonomy? If others can strongly influence your behavior through this information, it is not a leap to say you are not in complete control of your actions. Where the patterns of your behavior are observable, what you do next can be simply an issue of steering by others.

Conclusion

The conundrum of the individuality ideal is the always present rebuttal to the entire argument above: "So what? I am not important enough for anyone to care about me." Yet this is precisely the reason why we need to reconsider our "individuality." Maybe you are not important enough for anyone to care about any of these things for you specifically. Nevertheless, because you are part of the society that everyone lives in, information about you is used to invade the privacy of others. In other words, in order for any of our privacy to be protected, all of our privacy must be protected.

-- MattDavisRatner - 05 Mar 2009

I have been having a difficult time making this as cohesive as I had hoped. The idea that social knowledge is far more accurate than we believe because of our "uniqueness" bias has so many interrelated factors that this approach may not have been the most effective. A focus on the "everyone must have privacy for anyone to have privacy" may be a more efficient seed to start this discussion.

-- MattDavisRatner - 11 Mar 2009

I agree with your above comment. The second section in particular seems out of place - the first and the third go together well, but I feel like by the end it hasn't really addressed the thesis you expressed in the introduction. If you want to keep your uniqueness thesis, you may want to look into psych research, as there is probably extant work on the topic (though you may not want to use "uniqueness bias", as this term has already been coined in another context: http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/29/5/559)

-- TheodoreSmith - 15 Mar 2009

• Here's a piece suspended at the verge of editing. Ted made a suggestion, which was helpful, and confirmed your own awareness of the difficulty. But there it stopped. Being edited would help you understand what to do next: the editor would suggest a reorganization, and you'd say "Ah, yes, that would be better." But what you really need is not the edit but the clue to how to do the edit. I'm not sure I have that. But here's the basic problem: you split one idea into three components and discussed them separately. That didn't work. Now you should try a structure that doesn't break the idea into pieces, but rather exhibits directly connected facets. Individualism and privacy seem to be related in a certain direct and predictable way. But actually, the cultural bias towards the individual free of his context that creates the demand for privacy in the sense of autonomy reduces the individual's ability to perceive how his autonomy is actually undercut by failures of secrecy and anonymity.